[This article appeared in the Winter 1977 issue of The Occasional Review, pp. 55-79.It is based on a guest lecture the author
presented to the student body at BethelCollege in Newton,
Kansas.]

The Concept of Freedom in Modern Social Philosophies

Dwight D. Murphey

In
jurisprudence there has been an endless, and for the most part sterile,
discussion of the “true meaning” of the term “law.”Writers on legal philosophy will often strain
after an all-encompassing definition and will arrive at a meaning without
placing their definition within the confines of any consciously articulated
theoretical system within which the definition will be intellectually
appropriate.The result is often one of
two things: Either the definition hangs out in space by itself as an unrelated
specimen of man’s hair-splitting artistry, or else the author has in fact
related it to one of the comprehensive social philosophies, but without saying
so and without acknowledging that the validity of the definition depends upon
the merit of the overall philosophy.He
will have smuggled in his social and political predilections without perhaps
even knowing that he has done so.When
he goes on to insist that his is the enlightened definition of the term,
neither he nor his readers may realize that his definition encapsulates an
entire philosophy.

A striking
example of this is modern liberalism’s enthusiastic approval of Oliver Wendell
Holmes, Jr.’s, definition of law as “nothing more or less than a prediction of
what the judge will do in fact.”It is a
definition that seems innocuous enough to the uninitiated, to whom almost any
definition will seem plausible, but the reason modern liberals warm to it so
heartily is that it focuses empirically and relativistically on the process of
judge-made law.Such a focus leads on by
easy stages to such a statement as Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes’ that
“the Constitution is what the judges say it is.”The concept of law expressed by Holmes is
serviceable to legal and constitutional flexibility.In turn, this flexibility is favored because
of its own serviceability to an active state and also because it was a tactical
necessity during the decades in which modern liberals sought (with eventual
success) to bypass the traditional classical liberal construction of the
Constitution.

Modern
liberals frequently revel in the supposed merits of Holmes’ definition for its
own sake, as if it had a delightful intrinsic validity that they have been
smart enough to see but that the much less brilliant conservative legal
thinkers obtusely have not.My point is,
though, that this has the logic turned around.In itself, Holmes’ definition is pedestrian; it becomes supercharged
with significance only when considered in the context of the modern liberals’
larger theoretical and tactical scheme.It is worth noting that it is that scheme that breathes life into the
definition, not the definition that justifies the larger philosophy.

These
observations have been by way of introduction to my discussion in this article
of still another major concept—the idea of freedom
(or of liberty, which many authors,
including myself, treat as synonymous with it).Just as with “law,” it is possible to define “freedom” in a vacuum,
sterilely.It is also possible to define
it through the same reverse logic we have just noted, arriving at a definition
that implicitly subsumes a major worldview.What I would hope to do would be to put the discussion in the right
order.I would like to paint a
sufficiently vivid and empathetic picture of each of the major social and
political philosophies that their respective concepts of freedom will be seen
as a function of each philosophy’s total perception of man and society.Each philosophy does indeed, surprising as it
may seem, have a concept of freedom, just as it does of equality and justice
and so on.The proponents of each are
persuaded that their view of the world is sound and beneficial, at least to the
people they think count; they are understandably anxious to appropriate to
their own use the various emotively favorable terms used by humanity in
thinking about society.

But before
I start my review of the philosophies, a few caveats are in order:

1.Because of the brevity of the article, my
discussion of each philosophy will necessarily be simplified, a mere overview,
with all that that entails.

2.Precisely because my views are
interpretations, they are controversial; there is no pretense that they are
admitted by everyone.So the reader
should approach them, as I hope he does all social thought, with care.

3.The fact that I will be relating several
competing philosophies, each with its own definition of freedom, does not of
itself justify a relativistic assessment of the philosophies such as would
occur if the reader were to throw up his hands and say “they must all be
equally good.”I hope to be fair to the
worldviews discussed, but I would be the last to say that they have equal
merit.

As the Westemerged into modernity,
innumerable factors combined to break up the medieval consensus.An agricultural revolution had long been
underway, laying the foundations for the later Industrial Revolution; a landed
society had seen the rise of the commercial towns and of the bourgeoisie; the
mental insularity of the Middle Ages had been shattered by the discovery of
ancient manuscripts, the contact with Islamic civilization, the Crusades, the
startling new Copernican worldview and the discovery of America.We don’t need to adhere to Marxian dialectic
to realize that the time was ripe for a new philosophy.

Its precursor was Bernard Mandeville.Even so late as the early eighteenth century,
the prevailing ethical conception—reflecting an organic, religiously centered
society—was that personal “pride” and the pursuit of self-interest were
vices.In The Fable of the Bees, Mandeville stood this outlook on its head by
arguing that it is precisely man’s self-interest that is most conducive to
human well-being.His argument was not
yet fully classical liberal and he used some mercantilist arguments to support
his thesis, as when he remarked that prostitution in London
was of benefit because it put money into circulation, but he had nevertheless
caught a glimpse of the informing principle of an individualist society.

A few years
later Adam Smith, although abhorring the scandalous overtones of Mandeville’s
approach, formulated a systematic exposition of how a market economy, made up
of countless individuals interacting voluntarily, can indeed work.Such an economy, Smith argued, involves neither
vice nor chaos, as the mercantilists asserted.He saw it as enormously productive and spontaneously harmonious.This realization has been elaborated and
refined during the ensuing two centuries by the many thinkers of the classical
and neo-classical schools of economics: Ricardo, Senior, Say, the Mills,
Menger, Bohm-Bawerk, Mises, Hayek and Friedman, to name a few.

It is a
mistake, though, to think of the new outlook primarily in terms of economics, even
though the overwhelming portion of the intellectual work was done there.Its "informing principle” went much
further.I call this principle the
“vitalist perspective” since classical liberals have seen man’s potential as
inhering in the vast corpus and rich diversity of mankind itself.Their reliance has been on the vitality of
average human beings, whom they have seen as capable of immense productive
effort even, or rather especially, in the absence of the directing hand of a
Caesar or a central planner.A society
of free individuals is to classical liberals the fulfillment of mankind’s most
generous aspirations.Instead of living
out his life in slavery or serfdom or in a position as a hierarchical
underling, the average man could make himself an abundant life on a higher
plane than ever before, participative, self-reliant and self-fulfilling.

There is
mixed into this an abiding fear of government and a welcoming of individual
freedom, but it should also be noted that there are, in addition, a number of
centripetal, cementing forces that make up part of the classical liberal
ideal.The goal is “ordered liberty” or
“liberty under law.”The individualistic
society, properly understood, requires an ample framework of law and
institutions and a pervasive ethic of self-reliance, responsibility and civic
virtue.Since the freedom endorsed is to
be shared by all and to last over time, these desiderata require substantially
more channeling of the individual’s energies through norms impressed by family,
church, school, and peers than is implied by any sort of “do your own thing”
notion of freedom.

I think
that by now we are all aware that the classical liberal aspiration has run into
serious trouble.The reasons are legion:
Bourgeois society has not thus far been inclined to raise itself culturally and
intellectually above the Philistine mediocrity that its critics for thousands
of years have seen in it; the modern intellectual subculture has for a century
and a half harbored the most profound alienation against commercial
civilization and bourgeois values; there has been a consequent drain of
intellectual resources away from classical liberalism, with the result that it
has been rendered defensive, doctrinaire and non-reformist; and the inclination
of the average man, ascendant for the first time in history, to embrace a
conception of society that centers on self-reliance and responsibility has been
thoroughly problematical.I am myself a
classical liberal and despite all of these things I do not believe that there
has been a definitive showing of the ultimate unsuitability of a free society
to human nature, but I do believe that there are major factors in the dynamic
of modern life that will have to change before men will be ready to embrace
classical liberal values and make the most of them.

If we turn
now specifically to the classical liberal conception of freedom, we see that
there have been varied formulations by different thinkers, reflecting an
assortment of methodologies and metaphysical underpinnings, but that each has
kept in mind at least two major desiderata: The need for an appropriate
setting, within a network of mutual rights and obligations, for more or less
autonomous men; and the necessity of delimiting the power of government.

In the
opening chapters of Friedrich Hayek’s The
Constitution of Liberty and in my book Emergent
Man, the formulation is in terms of “reducing coercion as much as
possible.”[1]This entails a detailed analysis of the
nature of coercion and leads on to the discussion of a protected private sphere
and of the voluntary transaction.The
broad range of social circumstances is then subject to examination to formulate
the principles upon which coercion may be reduced and the voluntary
accentuated.The method here is
rationalistic, seeking an accommodation of competing interests so that broad
alternative avenues of expression will be open.

It is
surprising, then, that a short time later in the same book Hayek shifts his
ground to a more historically rooted, organic methodology.At that point he decries what he sees as the
rationalistic model-building of nineteenth century classical liberal
thought.Instead, he finds the meaning
of liberty most profoundly in a tradition—the tradition of the Rule of Law
which he traces back to the isonomia of
the ancient Greeks.The caprice of the
state is limited by a binding rule, applying equally to everyone and set down
well in advance, and the acting man is aided by the existence of dependable
norms.The institutions of the Rule of
Law are seen to have grown slowly over a long tradition in English and American
history.

A third
methodology could aptly be called the aprioristic,
or axiomatic, formulation.Here,
classical liberal principles—such as, say, the inviolability of private
property or the oft-repeated formula that the sole function of government is to
act against force and fraud—are seen as truths derived from “the nature of man qua man” or from natural law.Thereafter, the task is deductively to
determine the application of the axiom in the various circumstances of life.

The three
approaches involve important differences, but they all relate to the overall
classical liberal perception of man.Accordingly, they address problems classical liberals perceive as
foremost in society and offer solutions that are consistent with classical
liberal values.

The term “Burkean conservatism” may be
used narrowly to denote specifically the doctrines enunciated by the British
statesman Edmund Burke in the late eighteenth century.I will want to use it in a more pervasive
sense in this article to refer to an entire complex of values and of
institutions that was of enormous importance in the history of Western
civilization for over two thousand years.This complex—involving hierarchy,
religion, community, order and tradition—assumed a succession of
cultural forms, but in a general sense can be said to have been the predominant
worldview in the West from the time of the RomanRepublic to the middle of the
nineteenth century.Even in the secular,
egalitarian twentieth century, its values are articulated by a number of
thinkers and writers of the highest merit.Because of the great age and sweep of this complex of values, I am
sensitive to the superficiality of naming it after a single man, especially one
who lived so late as the eighteenth century; but we are justified in applying
Burke’s name to it by the fact that his Reflections
on the Revolution in France, written at a time when its values were under
severe attack, articulated its principles and ideals more comprehensively than
they had perhaps ever been stated before.

I will
start my review of it with the RomanRepublic,
since there is much about the Republic that is instructive about the Burkean
paradigm.During and immediately after
its long and repeated wars with Carthage,
the Republic was a tightly knit, organic society.The intense pressures of war brought a need
for stern virtue, austerity and a strong commitment on the part of the
individual to the community as a whole.(These qualities are in evidence today in our museums when we see the
stern-countenanced busts of the old Romans, which with their frowning demeanor
illustrate the gravitas and disciplina of that time.)Despite the earlier centuries of struggle
between the patricians and the plebeians during which the plebeians had
succeeded in overcoming their inferior status in Roman life, the Punic Wars
called back into play the need for a continuity of leadership.This was provided by the Senate and the
families of the ex-Consuls, who became the new aristocracy, the nobiles.

The
Republic was intellectually, culturally insulated, partly by circumstance and
partly by choice, as when Cato the Elder cut short the visit by three Greek
philosophers.There was a sense of
tradition which was sufficiently great that the Republic was known as the mos maiorum—“the tradition of our
ancestors.”This traditionalism was, of
course, fully compatible with the insularity and the dedication to civic
virtue.All, in turn, were complemented
by the Republic’s strong religious center, which added pietas, the “fear of the Roman gods,” to the list of virtues.The family was also a major institution, with
strong parental authority.The economic
base was landed, not commercial, although the economy was that of the rustic
farmer rather than of large plantations (these, known as latifundia, came later).

This
tightly-knit, organic community did not last, of course.It began to disintegrate soon after the wars
with Carthage were over.But it is significant that virtually all
later Romans, during the six centuries Rome
continued to exist in the West, looked back on the mos maiorum with reverence as the best time in Roman history.

If now we list the components that went to
make up the Republic, we readily see the extent to which, in an underlying sense,
they characterize also the Middle Ages:

.Community

.Discipline

.Aristocracy

.Tradition

.Religion

.The family

.Insularity

.A landed economic base

This
continuity of institutions and of values is worth remarking even though the
Middle Ages wore a distinctly different cultural face and even though the
Christianity that was central to the Middle Ages was a very different religion
than that worshipped by the Romans of the Republic.From a distance, the similarities suggest a
long-standing continuity in Western civilization.The religion became Augustinian Christianity,
the aristocracy that of the lords and the kings; the economy became that of the
manor, with feudalism replacing the rustic Roman farmer and even the later latifundia.The ethical commitment to austerity and
discipline gave way to the ideals of civility and chivalry, but nonetheless
remained an ethical consensus.Tradition
and insularity were, if anything, heightened; there was a profound suspicion of
the human reason, will and appetite which together could serve as acids to
disintegrate the social order.

To the
conservative, this was a society that had its bearings.It had, above all, not lost sight of the
reality of God; and it realized the weakness and fallibility of man and
organized itself accordingly.When the
advent of the modern age shifted the emphasis to a secular concern for the
things of this world, the conservative saw this not as an enhancement of man’s
relationship with reality, but as an obliteration of the most fundamental
existential fact.When there was an
onrush of doubt and rationalistic questioning, he perceived it not as a
resurgence of man’s intellectual dignity, but as a crumbling of traditional
values and as a neurotic assertion of hubris.
When man became preoccupied with
material well-being, he saw a decline in spiritual values.

I think my
description thus far, although brief, has been sufficient to permit us an
understanding of what the Burkean feels on the subject of freedom.T. S. Eliot expressed a characteristic
assessment of classical liberalism (which, we must remember, views itself as
the philosophy of liberty) when he wrote that “by destroying traditional social
habits of the people, by dissolving their mutual collective consciousness into
individual constituents, by licensing the opinions of the most foolish, by
substituting instruction for education, by encouraging cleverness rather than
wisdom, the upstart rather than the qualified, by fostering a notion of getting on to which the alternative is a
hopeless apathy, Liberalism can prepare the way for that which is its own
negation: the artificial, mechanised or brutalized control which is a desperate
remedy for its chaos.”[2]

The
individual is best served not by an autonomous liberty but by life within an
organic order which will embody far more than he could ever create by
himself.“The appetites for destruction
and violence and ruthless power are no less congenital than the appetite for
sexual gratification,” Russell Kirk has written; “so society must obscure and
repress and divert the extreme form of such appetites, that men may live at
peace with one another.”[3]This echoes the sentiment Burke expressed
when he said that “society requires not only that the passions of individuals
should be rejected, but that even in the mass and body as well as in the
individuals, the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will
controlled, and their passions brought into subjection.”[4]

To modern
readers other than Burkeans, this will seem far from libertarian.But in that regard it is worth remembering
that the Burkean worldview is not inspired by malevolence; it is based on a
certain perception of what is thought to be fundamentally true and of what is
best for man.

The ideal of egalitarian socialism was
well developed as early as the ancient Greeks, where one of Aristophanes’
comedies, for example, had great fun presenting a scheme for shared wealth and
wives.[5]Egalitarian models were formulated prior to
the modern era in such books as Sir Thomas More’s Utopia and Campanella’s The
City of the Sun.These early
manifestations suggest that a communal organization of human life is one of the
natural models that appeal to the mind; if so, it is likely that the idea will
always be with us in one form or another.

I do not
believe, though, that this satisfactorily explains the enormous thrust toward
egalitarian ideology that has occurred since the middle of the nineteenth
century.I attribute that far more to a
dynamic factor of massive proportions that has made modern Western history
unique: the intense alienation of the intellectual from the bourgeoisie and the
intellectuals’ resulting alliance with “have-nots” of every description.I think it is very questionable whether there
would have been a significant socialist movement in modern life if this
phenomenon had not occurred.The
alienation—together with its causes and consequences—is too large a subject for
this article, but I would not want to discuss egalitarian socialism without at
least alluding to it.

The basic
perception of social reality that lies at the heart of egalitarian socialism is
that many people, amounting to a substantial portion of humanity even in Europe
and America,
are trapped by their environment and are subject to “exploitation” because of
their weakened condition unless they are helped out of their predicament by an
outside force.

The first
part of this is that many people are trapped.They are not thought to bring much effective energy to life; nor are
they expected to, since I think it is a fair thing to say that egalitarian
socialist thought is not at all anxious to join in any sort of “bourgeois
ethic” that would impute a moral imperative toward self-reliance and
capability.And in addition to these
factors, the environment is seen as monolithic, defeating them without a really
meaningful chance of escape.

It is easy
to see how the various exploitation theories follow in the train of this
perception.Where a classical liberal
sees coercion as the central problem in society, the egalitarian socialist sees
weakness and exploitation.The
exploitation is explained in several ways, since there is more than one theory.The accepted theory in the United
States today, held by perhaps ninety-nine
percent of the people, is what I call the “common sense” or “strength versus
weakness” theory, based on a “bargaining power” rationale.This perceives a worker as in a position of
weakness and urgency when he is looking for a job, so that an employer is in a
good position to dictate the terms of employment.In socialist thought, this is backed up with
class theory, which postulates that workers cannot better their position by
mobility, since all employers are members of the same class and will dictate
the same (or at least similar) exploitive terms.

The “labor
theory of value” has also been important in socialist exploitation theory,
especially in the writings of Rodbertus and Marx.The original classical economists had defined
value as being the amount of work that had gone into something.Socialist theory extends this (1) by making
the value judgment that all of the return should go to those who did the work,
and (2) concludes from this that any return at all to the entrepreneur is for
that reason per se exploitive.This makes capitalism illegitimate by definition.It is worth noticing that it is not itself
based on a strength-versus-weakness rationale or even on class theory; in fact,
its advantage over these others is precisely that it seems more analytic and
therefore more scientific.

It is
noteworthy that methodologically such a use of the labor theory of value has
the logic turned around in just the same way as did the Holmesian definition of
law which I discussed at the beginning of this article.The correct sequence is that socialist values
and perceptions justify the labor theory of value, rather than the other way
around.If left by itself, the labor
theory of value amounts only to an arbitrary definition and an appended value
judgment.The definition and value
judgment make very little sense in the context of a market economy and its
ethical system.They do make sense as a critique of the
market if one presupposes the validity of
an opposing collectivist model, since in the collectivist economy there is
no place assigned to an entrepreneur.From this point of view, he is superfluous; and if he is superfluous,
his remuneration takes the form of an exploitive (i.e., unjustified)
extraction.Logically, the collectivist
perspective comes first—with the labor theory of value being merely an
elaboration of it.

Once the
egalitarian socialist concepts of “entrapment” and “exploitation” [Note in 2007: Most recently,
“victimization”] are understood, it is easy to see that there is a concept of
freedom that follows from them.Individualistic voluntarism for men who are weak and dependent and
exploited is seen not only as a pernicious folly, but as in fact a hypocritical
rationalization for continued exploitation: it is, as the socialists would
think, a hunting license for the strong to take advantage of the
defenseless.What is needed, therefore,
is that men be helped out of their dependency and exploitation by a
counter-force.

This
liberating force will most often be the socialist state or the revolutionary
movement.The libertarian function of
the state was central to Ferdinand Lassalle’s socialism: “The State it is which
has the function to accomplish this development of freedom, this development of
the human race in the way of freedom.The duty of the State is to enable the individual to reach a sum of
culture, power, and freedom, which for individuals would be absolutely
unattainable.The aim of the State is to
bring human nature to positive unfolding and progressive development—in other
words, to realize the chief end of man: it is the education and development of
the human race in the way of freedom.The State should be the complement of the individual.It must be ready to offer a helping hand,
wherever and whenever individuals are unable to realize the happiness, freedom,
and culture which befit a human being.”[6]

Herein lies
the great emotional and intellectual appeal of egalitarian socialism as both
libertarian and compassionate.(At least
this is the appeal in its outward ideological dimensions.We delude ourselves if we do not realize that
it is sincerely and deeply felt and is immensely attractive to those who share
it.But even as we permit ourselves to
see it empathetically in this light we ought not to lose sight of the fact that
the alienation of the intellectual, the envy of the so-called masses, and the
power-drives of those who see in socialism at least unconsciously an
opportunity for personal self-assertion are all part of the underlying appeal.)Most non-socialists don’t really understand
socialism because they have not let themselves see the world as the socialist
sees it.Socialism’s opponents perceive
it (wisely, I think) as a gigantic increase in coercive power, subject to the
type of abuse Lord Acton predicted.But
socialists see it as a gathering of compassionate energy directed at
alleviating the central problem in human society.

Marxist-Leninist
doctrine has so clothed itself with theoretical trappings that what I have just
said is not totally descriptive of it.I
think that from a distance the comments I have made do apply.But technically
Marxism-Leninism has taken a position on freedom that is not covered by these
observations.It is argued that such
concepts as freedom, equality and democracy are no more than the metaphysical
expressions of bourgeois class-interest, and that they are to be discarded
along with the bourgeoisie during the dictatorship of the proletariat.When finally the classless society is achieved,
all of these values will be attained—but in a true sense that will then reflect
the absence of an exploiting class.This
analysis bears the imprint of the historicist dimension of
Marxism-Leninism.It has added
appeal—especially to the intellectual—because it substitutes a detailed analysis
of history and of social movement for the seemingly more naïve model-building
of other socialists whom Marx decried as “utopian.”Just the same, Marxism-Leninism does contain
the basic elements characteristic of all egalitarian socialist thought: theories
of entrapment, of exploitation and of a liberating movement.

There is a form of socialist thought
that does not center on weakness and its alleviation.National socialism in Germany
under Hitler and fascism in Italy
under Mussolini combined a profoundly collectivist outlook with a desire for
heroic striving.For them socialism was
a vehicle for virile energy, transcending the mundane values of everyday
existence.

It will be
a mistake if some readers consider this part of my discussion irrelevant on the
ground that “national socialism was, after all, defeated more than thirty years
ago.”It is far from irrelevant, since
there is no reason to suppose that the collectivist outlook will always be
steeped in the egalitarian perspective.Collectivism is a vessel that can be filled with a wide variety of
contents.There is much in modern life,
indeed, that can lead people to a willingness—or, more accurately, to an
eagerness—to use the state as an instrument to achieve a powerful
integration.As Jose Ortega y Gasset
pointed out fifty years ago, the state can serve as a “direct action” tool to
cut through the niceties of civilized form.[7]Within a given setting, it can become the
vehicle for efficiency and order, and for the expression of the pride and anger
of a large number of people.In this
form, the state is thought to become coterminous with the spirit of a people
and to give a no-nonsense, dynamic expression to their will.

I can
briefly suggest only a couple of the underlying elements in modern society that
lend themselves to such a socialism:

.Ortega rightly observed that enormous numbers of modern men are shallow
and rootless, amounting really to spoiled children living within an advanced
civilization which they neither understand nor appreciate.As such, they feel few inhibitions that would
cause them to respect liberal values.The “direct action techniques” they employ represent, in effect, a
tantrum-like method of getting what they want.We see this in small ways all around us in daily life, and it is more
dramatically visible in the conduct of criminals and terrorists.When judged by liberal values, the fascist
state is seen as a comprehensive application of this mentality.

.Anti-bourgeois,
anti-liberal sentiment is found in every philosophy except classical
liberalism, but during the century and a half that followed the French
Revolution it received particularly virulent expression in continental
thought.In a famous book on the
subject, Julien Benda expressed alarm over the ferocious nature of much
nineteenth and early twentieth century thought in France
and Germany.[8]War and the heroic life were extolled in
contrast to the peaceable round of commercial existence.

.With the secularization of modern life, there has been an unfulfilled
spiritual need—a point that is spoken to extremely well by Viktor Frankl’s book
Man’s Search for Meaning.The great social religions have offered many
men a transcendent cause with which they could identify and that gave them a
sense of being part of something much larger and more significant than
themselves.I think this was well
illustrated in the movie Cabaret,
where the entire plot revolved around dissipation and decadence, but with a
single elevated touch being interjected when the young, blond Nazi stood up in
a beer garden and sang a stirring hymn.I doubt whether national socialism can really be understood without
substantial empathy for precisely that sentiment.

National
socialism in Germany
involved several additional features, of course.The ideal of what we might call “a national
spiritual corporation of the German people” arose in the nineteenth century as
a product of several complementary developments:first, there had been the Romantic revolt
against the Enlightenment, a revolt that extolled the virtues of the Middle
Ages and created a longing for an heroic age which was perceived as contrasting
sharply with modern life.[9]Then Hegelianism split into its left-wing and
right-wing variants, with the former holding to class theory and the latter to
national and racial theory.In the
second half of the nineteenth century, Volkish though arose in Germany
and through innumerable writings and novels developed the mystic of a Germanic
people who were thought to have been molded over many centuries by geography,
climate and a common blood.[10]Although not all Volkish thought was
anti-Semitic, it was an in-group philosophy that limited its vision and concern
to a single people, so that it was at least a receptive host for the
anti-Semitism that became increasingly virulent in the early twentieth
century.Still another element, which
was certainly consistent with these others, was the pervasive spirit of
nationalism that swept across Europe generally during
the century following the French Revolution.At the same time, the modern nation-state was growing in economic power
and military might.

The German
Youth Movement which began in 1896 gave expression to a wide variety of
anti-bourgeois viewpoints, so that it isn’t accurate to pinpoint its ideology
too narrowly, but in general it expressed the values just mentioned.[11]When World War I broke out in 1914, German
youth marched off to war ecstatically, sharing a common experience with an exhilarated
camaraderie and elan.This turned to
intense anger and frustration when Germany
was defeated and then blamed for the war (whom the overwhelming number of
Germans had considered a righteous defense of their country).This anger was one of the essential
ingredients of Nazism as we knew it.The
anger was poignantly expressed in the Nazi propaganda film The Triumph of the Will, photographed at the Nazi Party Rally at
Nuremberg
in September 1934.There is an
unforgettable scene in which the flag-bearers lowered their flags to the ground
in honor of fallen comrades as the names of the battlefields of World War I
were read off.Then they snapped the
flags back up as Hitler shouted defiantly from the speakers’ stand.

The
“national spiritual corporation” had a strongly collectivist aspect,
and—despite its “right-wing” label—included much out of socialist thought in
general.There is a scene in the same
film in which 55,000 members of the Workers Corps stood in formation before
Hitler, each in uniform with a spade over his shoulder, and called out chants
to Hitler about planting forests and constructing highways.Then Hitler told them that thereafter it
would be impossible for a German to go into any other line of work without
first being “one of you.”Despite
national socialism’s reliance on the “leadership principle” and its complete
denigration of democracy, it placed strong ideological emphasis on
egalitarianism.It was the
egalitarianism of common membership in a joint enterprise.

Needless to
say, national socialism had a great deal of attraction for those who were
caught up by it—although for some the attractiveness evaporated as they were
ground down by its relentless opposition to individuality.It was not intended, of course, to have
attraction for those who “didn’t count.”Hitler praised terror in Mein
Kampf and used it extensively against his perceived enemies.For several centuries, the “threshold of
compassion,” so to speak, had been falling in Europe as a reflection of the
ideals of the Enlightenment and the lessened hardship of human life, but this
had not been a uniform phenomenon; the emotional and intellectual threads that
came together in Nazism had held themselves outside the mainstream of that
compassion, so that to that extent Nazism consisted of an atavistic throwback
to the merciless days when armies would, say, bake their prisoners of war in
ovens.(The same could be said of Stalin
and Mao—and indeed must be said if we are not to be guilty of perpetuating the
compartmentalization of sensibility that has so disgraced the twentieth century
intellectual community.)

How, then,
does all of this relate to the national socialist concept of freedom?The answer really is obvious in the context
of the total worldview I have described: “freedom” is not the illusory freedom
of individualistic society, nor the freedom of the weak as they are aided
against the strong; it consists of participation in the only existence that is
really meaningful, the on-going processes of race and nation, especially when
the race itself is the creator of intelligence and culture.Nazi “freedom” is inseparable from the Nazi
outlook in general.For those who shared
its perceptions, there was nothing that struck them as ironic about the statement
by Walter Schultze that:

We proceed here from a notion of
freedom that is specifically our own, since we know that freedom must have its
limits in the actual existence of the Volk.Freedom is conceivable only as a bond to something that has universal
validity, a law of which the whole nation is the bearer… Ultimately freedom is
nothing else but responsible service on behalf of the basic values of our being
as a Volk.[12]

It is an easy matter to state the
modern American “liberal” definition of freedom, since twentieth century
welfare liberalism holds essentially the same perception of social reality and
the same concepts as does egalitarian socialism in general.What is more complex is to delineate the
exact nature of this liberalism.I have
thought that such an explanation is essential for each of the philosophies if
the respective concepts of freedom are to be understood in context.

The
difficulty stems from the fact that there is an essential ambiguity in the
nature of modern liberalism.Such
prominent liberal spokesmen as Hubert Humphrey and Eric Goldman have asserted
their belief that modern liberalism arose out of classical liberal roots, but
that it sought a more sensible and flexible adaptation to modern needs and to
the complexity of industrial and urban life.If such men believe this and if we are to credit their sincerity (which
I think we must, especially in the case of Goldman, who in my opinion is
extremely honest in the way he handles ideas), there is significance in it; it
tells us something, I think, about at least some modern liberals, who are
perhaps not as far removed from the traditional values of our society as we
might have supposed.But I will plainly
indicate my own belief in the insufficiency of their explanation of modern
liberalism.I believe it to be far too
easy and shallow an interpretation.)[Note in 2007: I have expressed
elsewhere my later change of opinion about Goldman.When I read the New Republic in preparation for my book on modern liberalism, I
found that he was the author in the mid-1940s of an article that expressed his
benign interpretation of modern liberalism and that seemed utterly out of place
with the almost thirty years of pro-Soviet writing that preceded and indeed
surrounded the piece.In that context,
of which he must have been fully aware, the view that modern liberalism was
essentially a reformist reaction to the growth of business corporations was
quite ludicrous.So, regrettably, I now have
a different feeling about the credibility of his interpretation.]

I would not
think of beginning my interpretation of modern liberalism with the end of the
Civil War, as Goldman did in Rendezvous
With Destiny.To do so is to miss
the central fact about American intellectual history, which in turn became the
most influential fact in the coalescence of modern liberalism: the rise of
intense intellectual alienation against American society at large that began in
about 1820.Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke of
“the soul of the soldiery of dissent” and described the withdrawal of “the man
of tender conscience” from the life of his times.[13]

At first,
this dissent had no common ideology; but as the century wore on it developed
more and more of a consensus.This was
augmented substantially when several thousand American doctoral candidates
studied in German universities under the German Historical School in the last
quarter of the nineteenth century.This
was the same school of thought as was involved in the Methodenstreit with the Austrian school of economics.It was vigorously anti-bourgeois and
anti-capitalist, although it is important to note that it was neither Marxist
nor revolutionary.[14]Its professors were known as “the socialists
of the chair,” but their socialism was mild compared with that of Marx and
Lassalle, so that today we rarely, if ever, find the Historical School represented
in the standard anthologies of socialist writing.

Back in
America, the tone adopted by modern liberalism is symbolized well, I think, by
the work of Herbert Croly, the founder of the New Republic magazine and author of The Promise of American Life.Croly was unrelenting in his attack on the classical liberalism of Jefferson,
but otherwise his style was one of careful dissimulation.He advocated what was in essence a corporate
state, with big business to be encouraged to become bigger and then to be married
to government planning, but he carefully avoided the socialist label.This diffidence and gradualism, while yet
combined with considerable intellectual alienation and the Left’s overall
perception of social reality, has been the defining characteristic of modern
liberalism.Indeed, a reaction against
its dissimulation and opportunism was one of the important causes of the rise
of the New Left a few years later.

This is not
to say that modern liberalism has not derived a number of its facets from native
American roots.There has always been a
significant school of thought in American history that has favored an active
state, and the continuation of its thinking would in all likelihood have
produced something similar to the New Deal even if the alienation of the
intellectual had never occurred and even if there had not been a substantial
importation of socialist concepts from Europe.This, in fact, is what Humphrey and Goldman understand modern liberalism
to be.It is also true that one of the
aspects of the Jeffersonian-Jacksonian classical liberal faith was a deep
belief in democracy, with a broadened participation of the average citizen in
the processes of government.This thrust
toward democracy was continued by modern liberalism, while at the same time it
also continued the Jacksonian opposition to corruption as a major theme.The business cycle, the socializing effects
of war, the end of the frontier and countless other factors also entered in.Perhaps most significant was the drain of
intellectual resources away from classical liberalism, which ceased to be a
major reformist force in American life.Modern liberalism was known as “progressivism” until the middle of the
1920s; we are told something about the condition of classical liberalism at
that time when we realize that modern liberalism was able to assume the name
“liberal” without appearing to encroach significantly on anyone else’s domain.

I began
this section by saying that modern liberalism embraces the same basic
conceptual framework as does egalitarian socialism.Modern liberal ideology is functionally a
reflection of the alliance of the alienated intellectual with the various
“dispossessed” elements in American life.This alliance (which by an accident of history also included the “solid
South”) is what political scientists call the “New Deal coalition.”It is also the same alliance as occurred in Europe
as the basis for egalitarian socialism.The upshot is that both modern liberalism and egalitarian socialism
perceive social reality primarily in terms of entrapment and exploitation; and
each considers the state a liberating, benevolent instrument.

The modern
liberal concept of freedom is simply a part of this overall perception of
society.It was illustrated extremely
well in Hubert Humphrey’s book The Cause
is Mankind when he asked, “How free
is a scientist if he does not have equipment and facilities with which to do
research?” and proceeded to advocate a program of federal government assistance
to science.[15]His approach reflected the various aspects of
the modern liberal concept of freedom: (1) he permitted himself to see even
scientists as unfortunates who are trapped by their circumstances; (2) his use
of the term “freedom” had nothing to do with the existence or non-existence of
coercion, as a classical liberal would have used the word, since it never
entered his mind to inquire whether the scientist who lacked equipment lacked
it because of someone else’s coercive intervention; and (3) he was ready, even
anxious, to call in the state to liberate the scientist from his entrapment.

I ought
perhaps to add that the modern liberal’s implicit acceptance of egalitarian
socialist concepts is particularly crucial at the present juncture in American
history.With the rise of the New Left,
the more alienated among the intellectuals broke away into avowedly socialist
movements.From that vantage point they
turned vitriolically against modern liberalism.The modern liberals who stayed behind, who were inferentially the less
alienated members of the liberal community, were at a crossroads, so to speak,
in terms of their own future direction.The departure of the alienated core left an opening toward the right, so
that there could be a possible movement in the direction of classical liberal
values.But this opening has been
blocked by three main factors: the quieting of the New Left itself; the
inability of classical liberals, from their defensive and fragmented posture
after a century of being on the run, to see and take advantage of the
opportunity; and, perhaps most important, the modern liberals’ own acceptance
of the socialist conceptual framework, which has had the effect of placing a
substantial gulf between the two schools even though the time is ripe for a
rapprochement.Accordingly, an historic
opportunity is being lost.

The explanations that were offered for
the rise of the New Left in the United States
in the 1960s have seemed to me, for the most part, to misunderstand its
origins.The usual explanation, which
modern liberals frequently voiced, was that the New Left represented an
idealism and sensitivity that was responding to real issues but that
unfortunately carried its militancy too far.But this analysis is, it seems to me, both too shallow and too
laudatory.

The
important thing to realize is that modern liberalism has at all times harbored
deeply within itself—in its intellectual circles and in its literature—the
alienation to which I have referred.The
gradualistic, dissimulative style adopted by modern liberalism has not been
fundamentally designed to “scratch the itch” embodied in this alienation.Unless the alienation were to have withered
away, which we know it did not, it is understandable that at some time it would
break out into the open and take vehement exception to modern liberalism
itself, which it has necessarily perceived as insufficient and fundamentally
dishonest.If my analysis of this is
correct, it means that the New Left was inherently present within modern
liberalism from the beginning.

Its
emergence awaited the proper combination of catalysts and the chance for mass
support.The confrontations that
occurred during the civil rights movement had a radicalizing effect and this
was followed within a short time by the opposition to the Vietnam War.With these catalysts opening the door, the
New Left resurrected virtually all of the doctrines of nineteenth century
socialism and poured them out into American society voluminously for the first
time.(This is why the name “New Left”
is actually a misnomer that ought to stimulate the juices of even the least
avid of the truth-in-packaging enthusiasts.)The alienation and the intense anti-bourgeois ideology combined with the
essentially hedonistic orientation of American youth to produce an ironic
phenomenon: the idealistic and yet shallow sans-culotteism
of the hippy counter-culture.

To a
substantial portion of American youth, the resulting lifestyle and ideology had
quite a plausible libertarian appeal.What, indeed, could be more consistent with true freedom than “doing
your own thing?”And yet, it was not a
classical liberal individualism that was intended.It was not ordered liberty within a system of
coordinate rights and obligations that was sought.The liberty in which the counter-culture reveled
was overwhelmingly a manifestation of a desire to do whatever was necessary to
undercut the norms of bourgeois society.If the predominant society wore its hair short, the new style was to be
long; if the middle class bathed regularly and wore clean clothes, the
counter-culture would do just the opposite.It was a style dictated by its shock value.We saw much of Rousseau and much of this
deliberate undercutting of norms in Jerry Rubin’s book Do It! when he said “Man was born to let his hair grown long and to
smell like a man.We are descended from
the apes, and we’re proud of our ancestry.We’re natural men lost in the world of machines and computers.Long hair is more beautiful than short
hair.We love our bodies.We even smell our armpits once in a while.”[16]

It is
highly doubtful whether these would be the permanent values of a collectivist
society brought about by the New Left.There have been some socialist authors, such as Fourier, who have
pointed somewhat toward a sensual and relaxed way of life; in fact, the attack
on bourgeois norms has been an integral part of the Left since its
beginning.But for the most part an
intellectual is a perfectionist.Except
when it is tactically useful, he is probably not ultimately tolerant of the
uncommitted dilettante and slob.One
suspects that a future Lenin would make short work of the likes of a Jerry
Rubin, just as Lenin did of Rubin’s counterparts in his own day.And if this is so, the “do your own thing”
philosophy of the New Left must be understood as merely a transitional phase.

In keeping with the spirit shown by
John Stuart Mill in his essay On Bentham
and Coleridge, I would agree that there is much to be learned from each of
the modern social philosophies, since each has seen its own aspect of the human
condition.But I would again warn the
reader against jumping to the type of relativistic eclecticism that so many
undergraduates, for example, choose as the lazy way out.If we are mentally responsible, there is no
substitute for the most considered evaluation of what the social reality really
is.Our concept of freedom will then
take its place as part of our understanding of that reality.

[8]Julien Benda, The Betrayal of the Intellectuals (Boston: The Beacon Press, 1930).

[9]For a description of the many thinkers who
made up this revolt against the Enlightenment, see Reinhold Aris, History of Political Thought in Germany, From 1789-1815 (London: George Allen
and Unwin, Ltd, 1936).

[10]The Volkish movement is described in detail
in George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German
Ideology (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1964).

[14]A good discussion of the German Historical
School and of its impact upon American intellectual life is found in Jurgen
Herbst’s The German Historical School in
American Scholarship (Cornell University Press, 1965).